


If Night Comes

by Jennie



Category: Station 19 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Future Fic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 16:14:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18898162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennie/pseuds/Jennie
Summary: Lucas Ripley may be dead, but he's not gone from his loved ones' thoughts.ORChief Winston of the LAFD has heard a lot of firefighter candidates claim they've wanted to be firefighters their whole lives, but Adrian Ripley is the first one to claim he hated firefighting for most of his life.





	If Night Comes

Chief Emmanuel Winston of the Los Angeles Fire Department enjoyed his job.  He had been chief for thirteen years at this point and was looking at several more years before he retired.  There was lots of paperwork, of course, but he didn’t mind that, and the other parts of the job made up for it.  He was passionate about fire science, fire safety and keeping his department’s reputation as the best in the world.

And part of that was interviewing potential firefighter candidates.

He looked down at the file in front of him.   _Adrian Ripley_.  “Send him in,” he used his office intercom to contact his personal assistant, who replied in the affirmative.  A short moment later, the door to his office opened, and a tall biracial man entered.

“Have a seat, please.”  He gestured to the chairs on the other side of his desk, and the man sat down, back straight, piercing blue gaze on him.

“Sir.” Ripley said in a strong baritone voice.  

Winston looked down at the file in front of him.  Top marks on the Firefighter Candidate Assessment, and top marks on the Candidate Physical Abilities Test.  He was an EMT-B already and had a year’s experience. He was recently graduated from UCLA with a 3.9 GPA and had been pre-law.  Ripley was a competitive swimmer as well, and ran marathons. He had strong letters of recommendation from former professors, and strong references from his previous employer, the Bayside Ambulance Company.  He was clean cut, seemed respectful, and was definitely qualified physically as well as mentally for the job.

But so were a lot of people.

The interview was going to be Ripley’s place to shine.  Winston had already heard over fifty interviews at this point, for this hiring cycle, and had heard thousands over the years.  Each hiring cycle ended up with a couple thousand applicants, and hundreds made it to the interview stage. The interviews lasted for weeks, and Winston was already tired of hearing the same thing over and over again.

Ripley needed to stand out if he wanted a chance of being moved forwards.

“So,” Winston said, leaning back and steepling his fingers on his desk, “why do you want to be a Los Angeles firefighter?”

“My entire life,” Ripley began, and Winston was already ready to tune him out.  How many interviews had begun with “my entire life I’ve wanted to be a firefighter?”  Firefighter was one of those jobs that kids played at, dressed up as, and obsessed over.  Firefighters were _cool_ to the main populace, and Winston was almost disappointed that the man who gave such a strong impression was going down that tired old road.  “- I never wanted to become a firefighter,” he finished.

Winston had to keep his head from jerking.  Now _that_ was unusual.

“I never liked firefighting.  In fact,” Ripley said, his eyes looking downwards for a second before looking right back into Winston’s gaze, “I probably hated it.”  He stopped, took a breath. “My mom’s a captain in the Seattle Fire Department, you see. She has been for about five years now. She was a lieutenant for a decade before that.  She enjoys her job a lot, but never really had aspirations to move up the ladder quickly and make a name for herself.”

He paused.  “To be honest, I think she was trying to keep her head down.  No,” he stopped, “I know she was trying to keep her head down.  She’s a hard worker and throws herself completely into her job, which is great for the people she saves, but really hard when you’re her only son and she’s your only family.”

Winston wanted to ask about Ripley’s father, but knew it wasn’t really his place.  There were a lot of private reasons people didn’t talk about their parents or family: divorce, death, lack of knowledge, criminal reasons.  It wasn’t any of Winston’s business, even if he was now curious.

“I say only family because I only grew up with a mother,” Ripley continued, “but as I’m sure you know, sir, a firefighter’s family is their shift, their fellow firefighters.  So I had lots of aunts and uncles to grow up with, besides my one biological aunt, who lives in Eugene, Oregon. She – my aunt – would still try to get to my important school events, and she was often the only one there, because my mom and her team had to work.

“And I’m not mad at my mother, because I know it’s the job, but you can see how it might make a negative impression on a kid, who just really wants his mom to be there for his role in the Holiday Pageant at school and instead has no one in the audience and has to go home with a friend instead: a friend who _has_ parents who recorded the pageant and are gushing about how lovely it was and how much they love their kid.”

There was a look in Ripley’s eyes, and Winston had no doubt that he’s remembering something specific that happened, perhaps many times.  He nodded to show he was listening, but Ripley was already continuing.

“And my dad – God, my dad.”  Ripley wore a wistful smile. “My dad was a firefighter too.  In fact, he was the chief of the Seattle Fire Department. And there was a multi-alarm fire at a coffee plant and he was incident commander and superseded the command of the site captain and went in the plant to rescue that captain, who was pinned down.  And somehow he got exposed to hydrofluoric acid and died a day later.”

Ripley looked down.  “I never knew my dad.  In fact, he died before my mom even knew she was pregnant.” He looked up again with a glint of something in his eyes, perhaps unshed tears.  He blinked, and they were gone. “So I grew up idolizing a man I never got to meet, and hating that he was taken from my because of his job. Except it wasn’t even his job – that captain had called the scene unsafe, refused to let anyone enter the plant.  That captain was ready to die there. My dad could have made the decision to leave him there because the structure was unsafe, except my dad didn’t. He chose to go into a building that was losing integrity, with exploding bags of coffee, because that was the type of man he was.  And he lost his life for it.”

Ripley ran a hand through his short-cropped curls.  “So firefighting always left a sour taste in my mouth.  And while I respected the work firefighters do, I never wanted to be one.  Not until…” He reached for the pitcher of water Winston keeps on his desk during the interviews, pouring himself a glass.  He took a sip and set his glass down. “Not until the fire at the UCLA dorms last year.”

Winston nodded.  He remembered that fire, of course.  It was a big one, with lives lost and lots of property damage.

“I was in that dorm with a friend.  She has asthma and we were trapped. I…I thought she was going to die.  I thought _I_ was going to die.  I had just started work as an EMT, and I grew up surrounded by firefighters, so I knew the basics: stay down, test the walls and doors and stuff.  Stuff my family made sure was in my head. But that doesn’t help when there’s a huge fire and you’re trapped on the seventh floor with someone who can’t breathe.” He gazed off into the wall above Winston’s shoulder.  “I thought we were done for.”

He blinked again, pausing. This incident clearly made an impact on the man, and technically this wasn’t part of the required interview.  Winston liked to know his firefighters’ motivations though, so he always opened with that question. Rarely did someone go into such detail however.

Winston was about to ask him if he wants more water when he continued.  “And then there was a sudden clarity to the situation. And I swear I heard a voice telling me what to do.  And it seems –,” he paused again, biting his lower lip for just a second, before continuing, “it seems ridiculous, I know, and maybe I shouldn’t be saying this because you’ll think I’m crazy, but I did what the voice said, and Dee and I both made it out.  And I figured it was my Uncle Sully – he just retired as a Battalion Chief of the SFD with thirty-eight years of firefighting experience – I just figured it was his training, because he used to run drills with me, explain what to do in different scenarios.  So it made sense that my mind shut down, and I just did what I remembered. Except…except it didn’t sound like Uncle Sully, the voice. And I don’t know – but I dreamed about my dad that night. And I’d like to think that it was him, you know? Somehow my dad helped me get out of that fire alive.”

There were definitely tears in Ripley’s eyes now.  Winston let him get a hold of himself, while he gathered his own thoughts.  Firefighters were a superstitious lot. Every department, every firefighter had their own superstitions that they followed, and while there would be some good-natured teasing, generally it was accepted (as long as it didn’t interfere with the job).  Firefighters also came from all religions, including having none at all, but there was a general belief in some form of higher power, because sometimes you just couldn’t explain how you made it out. Sometimes, against all the odds, miracles happened.  Not often, but there was always that one call, that one patient that shouldn’t have made it but did, that one rescue that never should have worked, but did.

If Ripley and an asthmatic friend truly had been caught on the seventh floor of that fire, he shouldn’t be sitting in front of Winston now.  Not that Winston thought he was a liar. No, it was more that Winston attributed his presence to one of those firefighting miracles. The UCLA dorm fire had been very bad and still haunted many firefighters to this day, and Ripley’s story could be verified easily enough.

“I felt close to my dad,” he finally said, heaving a sigh.  “For the first time, well, _ever_ , I felt like I got my dad.  The firefighters on scene that eventually we found and helped us get out – they thought I had experience firefighting because of the way I handled the situation.”  This was something Winston was going to look into. He made a note on the pad in front of him. “But I didn’t – I don’t. I just…somehow knew what to do. And facing those flames made me realize that there was something missing inside me.  Something that came alive when put in that situation. I started researching becoming a firefighter the very next day.”

He stopped there and reached for the glass of water.

Winston waited until he finished drinking half the glass, before he leaned forwards in his chair.  “Thank you for your story. I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m glad you made it out of that fire.”

“Thanks,” Ripley replied, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

They sat in silence for another moment until Winston looked at the clock and realizes he was running behind schedule.  Normally when Winston posed that question, the interviewee spewed a couple of sentences about a fire they witnessed or how they had always loved the idea of firefighting or something else that was short and vaguely impersonal despite the personal nature of the question.  Rarely did a candidate show as much emotion as Ripley had. Winston liked it, even if it did eat into the time for the standard interview questions he had to ask.

“So, tell me about your functional skills and how your previous experiences make you firefighter material.”  He read the next question, the first official question off the paper, and prepared to take notes.

* * *

 

Adrian left Chief Winston’s office with a firm handshake and a pleasant dismissal.  He nodded at the other candidates waiting for their interviews and made his way out of the building onto the crowded Los Angeles streets.  He got to his car, parked in the designated lot, and just sat for a moment.

No one in Seattle knew he was applying to become a firefighter.

They knew about the UCLA dorm fire.  For one thing, it made national news.  He had called them as soon as he was released from the scene, ash and soot in his hair, smeared across his face.  He wasn’t in shock, but he was exhausted and high on adrenaline at the same time, and the conversation had been quick to just tell his mom that he had made it out okay, instead of going into detail about how sure he had been that he _wasn’t_ going to make it out.

There weren’t a lot of pictures of his dad around.  Aunt Jennifer had the majority of them from when his dad was younger, and he had at points in his life gone through all of those.  But it was like looking at the pictures of a stranger – there was no real connection to Adrian or to his mom. His mom had a couple of pictures, taken in the months before his father’s death, and she had printed one out and gave him a laminated copy of one where his dad is standing in the kitchen of his mom’s old apartment, stirring something on the stove with a grin on his face, in his uniform.

The picture was in his old room at his mom’s – he didn’t bother bringing it to UCLA with him.  Probably a good thing too, because it would have gotten destroyed in the fire like the rest of his stuff had (not that he kept much at school).  He didn’t look at the photo very often, but that night of the fire he wanted it for some reason, and he dreamed of his dad, sitting in the chair next to his bed in his SFD chief uniform, just watching him lie in bed.

_I love you_ , he could have sworn he heard his dad say as he drifted into a deeper sleep.

The next day he woke up and knew he was going to join the LAFD.

He never told his mom.  He started studying for the Firefighter Candidate Assessment and read up on what physical standards he had to meet.  He learned that this was the first year in several that LAFD was opening up applications for firefighters, and he needed the best scores possible.  He kept up with his classes for his last semester, threw himself into his job as an EMT-B (he got qualified in Seattle the summer after high school before moving to LA, figuring he could get a part time job while at school but not needing to until he wanted extra spending money his senior year because of his new girlfriend).  The girlfriend hadn’t lasted long, but the job had stayed.

He told his mom he was planning on staying in LA and working for a year before applying to law school – his original plan.  She accepted it, though she stated once again she missed him and couldn’t he do his gap year in Seattle? But he had told her he loved LA and he wanted to stay with his friends (both things were true).  He hated hiding things from her, but he just _couldn’t_ tell her that he was going into firefighting.

She came out for his graduation and he kept her away from most of his friends, who knew what his plans post-UCLA were.  Dee, his best-friend, was fully recovered from the fire at that point albeit still asthmatic, and was a great distraction for his mother.  She was going into wildlife biology and a PhD program in Montana, and regaled his mom with stories of previous field work she had done and what she planned to do in the summer.  Adrian’s quietness was passed off as jitters from just having graduated college, instead of the fact he was keeping a huge secret from her.

But now he had made it past the interview and was a background check, a panel discussion, and a medical and psych evaluation away from becoming a LA firefighter.  His original plan had been to wait and tell her after he was finished with the fire academy, but he realized now that he couldn’t wait that long to tell her. He couldn’t live with the secret any longer.

He picked up his phone and dialed.

“Hey, Mom, so I have something to tell you…”

* * *

 

The day Adrian Ripley graduates from the Los Angeles fire academy is sunny and warm with a light breeze wafting through the air.  He performs his drills like practiced and everything goes smoothly. The class is then announced as graduates, and instantly everyone is cheering and clapping.

He’s still in his turn-outs and gear when his mom comes up to him.  She’s wearing a dress and low heels, and smiles at him. “I am _so_ proud of you,” she says, grabbing him in a hug.  “And Lucas would be too,” she sighs in his ear. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too, Mom,” he says.  And for a moment there’s a colder breeze that wraps around them, causing his mother’s skirt to flutter.  He can almost hear a voice saying _I love you_.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. Kudos and comments are always appreciated. 
> 
> The title is from a quote: "And if night comes, I only see two stars: the evening star and you." (Philostratus, Letters, 1. 10).
> 
> Thank you so much for the beta-ing help, [fandommatchmaker19](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fandommatchmaker19/pseuds/fandommatchmaker19).


End file.
